Mobile music community town meeting: Notes Ronald

In the Mobile Music community town meeting we discussed how the participants experienced the workshop and what the differences with previous workshops were, but also what the everyone thought Mobile Music to be.
----
Some comments on the workshop:
Bart: Need for a theme to connect different subjects and hands-on sessions.
Lalya: might help if there would have been brainstorming sessions.
Kristina: focus is maybe too much on technologies and phones as opposed to music.
Kristina suggests that we could have an audience - let's say 30 kids.

Frauke remembers that a lot of projects were about walking
Dan Wilcox : easier to use a mobile phone when you're walking
Atau: is it because we're in Europe?
Lalya remembers projects in Canada that we're based on cycling
When you walk you can pay more attention to your surroundings

Yolande: open session on sunday had an audience - a good way to start the workshop.
Atau: The participants we're the audience in Cathy's performance.

Each workshop has been very different - no general theme has emerged.

The workshop has grown only a little (3 & 4 are about the same size)- it's kept small on purpose.

Is the community growing or shrinking? The community is not necessarily growing but the type of participants has shifted - from more tech-oriented to more musical.
Anna Dumitriu remarked that the workshop had a real 'make' feel to it - really hands-on.
Atau: 2 years ago there was no hands-on at all...

The mobile music workshop is not quite there yet to be taken up into the ACM library - it took NIME 6 years.

Adding another category of submission which is not necesarily very academic but more like a (free) position paper might be a good addition to the workshop. This category should not necessarily be published.

More performances and demo's would be a good addition as well.
The workshop could be more open - more installations and demo's - inviting a bigger crowd such as kids. This would then require a different festival-like structure.
----
Then the discussion continued trying to find a definition for Mobile Music:
There has always been mobile music - the workshop focusses mostly on the technology part of mobile music. The word mobile in mobile music is misleading because it relates to a mobile phone. Do we need a new term? locative audio?

What is Mobile Music
- using a phone? is a phone important?
- is it technology driven
- is it participatory/collaborative?
- is it a performance?
- does there have to be an audience?

Are we too early to define what is mobile music - focus on thought-provoking strong projects and let the collage of them be the definition of mobile music.

Frauke: Should Mobile Music be an intervention - how do public and private play a part?
----
And there were some comments on Mobile Music Workshop communication:
Preparation is very formal - ACM format might be a hindrance - in most cases an abstract is sufficient for other workshops. Participants are not all used to writing papers.

Not every community was addressed - the call did not reach everyone.

Communication - no press was invited intentionally apart form Amsterdam Weekly. Should a workshop like this be on the local news?